Category: Enemies Foreign & Domestic

Well, the idjit is not called ‘Mad Maxine’ for nothing. And ‘insurrection’ is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as a event the federal government has been given the power to deal with. So Maxie may just have shot herself in the foot.

In the wake of inner city looting and rioting across America, including destruction of people’s businesses and property, as well as violence against police and everyday Americans, Democratic rep. Maxine Waters has decreed that the use of the term ‘rioting’ is racist.

In an interview with The Cut, Waters seriously contended that the term “rioting” constitutes “negative language used far too often in a description of black people by folks who fundamentally don’t see black people the same way they see whites and others.”

“A lot of negative language gets used against black people, describing what whites often believe is true about us: that language includes ‘lazy,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘rioting,’” Waters added.

Waters explained that she prefers to label the rioting as “insurrection”.

“I said ‘insurrection’. People acting out of frustration and hopelessness and understanding that they don’t have an establishment — political or otherwise — that really cared about their ability to work or have good health care. Yes, I choose to call it an insurrection.” Waters declares.

Didn’t we already get an exposé of extreme action and militancy from Antifa by Project Veritas this year? Oh no, wait — that was from among Bernie Sanders’ campaign workers. At least they’re keeping busy these days.

This time, Project Veritas really has infiltrated Antifa, or at least one of its cells in Oregon. Their undercover operative managed to get some video and audio of training sessions in which extremists were urged to gouge people’s eyes, assault them and to “consider like destroying your enemy.” The operative has since “retired” from Rose City Antifa, the video notes at the end, but he’s still doing “blacklock” to keep his identity hidden:

Nicholas Cifuni, Rose City Antifa: “Practice Things Like an Eye Gouge, it Takes Very Little Pressure to Injure Someone’s Eyes.”

Nicholas Cifuni, Rose City Antifa: “Police Are Going to Be Like: ‘Perfect, We Can Prosecute These [Antifa] F**kers, Look How Violent They Are.’ And Not That We [Antifa] Aren’t, But We Need to F**king Hide That Sh*t.”

Nicholas Cifuni, Rose City Antifa: “Consider Like, Destroying Your Enemy. Not Like Delivering a Really Awesome Right Hand, Right Eye, Left Eye Blow You Know. It’s Not Boxing, It’s Not Kickboxing, It’s Like Destroying Your Enemy.”

Ashes, Rose City Antifa: “The Whole Goal of This, Right, is to Get Out There and do Dangerous Things as Safely as Possible.”

For an organization that’s supposedly not organized, their op-sec is … pretty impressive. The meetings apparently manage to mostly protect identities, so Nicholas Cifuni might have some griping to do after this video release. Or perhaps he might have some talking to do, either to the FBI or to his attorney. Someone in law enforcement is bound to take an interest in this tape, and perhaps in determining the identities of a few others who appear in it. At any rate, it’s clear that the group is organized enough for strategic planning sessions and training, and like PV’s undercover operative says, this suggests some money behind the organizing, too.

Unlike other PV projects, it doesn’t appear that they have more in the can on Antifa. That may not matter long, however, because the Department of Justice has now started to look into their involvement in the unrest sweeping cities this week:

Wray says the feds are pursuing "anarchists like Antifa and other agitators"

For the past couple of weeks, there have been plenty of people trying to deny any real organization behind Antifa and even their involvement in rioting, despite a long history of violent street action across the country. In the Twin Cities, our leadership tried pinning it on “white supremacists” from outside of the state, only to end up with egg on their faces when the data from arrests started coming to light. Even the SPLC ended up calling shenanigans on that claim. The DoJ’s focus on anarchists and Antifa will likely have a lot more success than attempts to shift the blame away from the extreme-leftist orgs that routinely conduct such operations, only not to this level of success.

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lashed out at The New York Times for allowing Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to publish an op-ed in the newspaper that features ideas that are supported by the majority of Americans.

Cotton’s op-ed accurately describes the violent riots that have rocked Democrat-controlled inner cities across the country over the last week in response to the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody last week.

Cotton then describes how the violent riots are harming the most vulnerable communities and suggests that the solution to fixing the problem would by to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military to highly unstable areas that are not doing what it takes to fix the problem:

One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.

The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested. In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect each of them from domestic violence.” Throughout our history, presidents have exercised this authority on dozens of occasions to protect law-abiding citizens from disorder. Nor does it violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which constrains the military’s role in law enforcement but expressly excepts statutes such as the Insurrection Act.

Ocasio-Cortez, along with leftist reporters at The New York Times, called James Bennet, Editorial Page Editor at The New York Times and brother to Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet (CO), for publishing the op-ed and made numerous false suggestions in doing so.

Ocasio-Cortez posed the following questions for Bennet:

Can you explain why you chose to publish misinformation in your pages in service of an “opinion” for state violence?

Can you explain your choice to publish it on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square?

Do you believe your Black colleagues saying your choices have put them at risk?

Other Qs: Did you consider the author‘s explicit call for violence (“no quarter”) when you chose to run this piece?

Is it your belief that you are not responsible for the factual integrity of what you publish?

Do you believe calling for violence is an “opinion”?

Ocasio-Cortez was unable to list off any of the “misinformation” that she claimed was contained in the piece…………

Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that the op-ed, which was published on June 3, was published on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre, which took place on June 4th and 5th in 1989.

Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that Cotton’s idea somehow puts blacks “at risk” suggests that only blacks are responsible for the violent riots and looting that is taking place.

Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that Cotton explicitly calls for violence is also false.

Cotton correctly noted in his op-ed that the majority of Americans, including nearly half of all Democrat voters, support deploying the military to stop the violent riots.

George Soros realized that it was very expensive and very hard to attempt to support so many leftwing legislators that they could change the law to make crime, well, not a crime.

So he settled on a new strategy. One that worked. He put a huge amount of money into the campaigns of leftwing, pro-crime prosecutors and attorney generals.

He wouldn’t bother to get laws changed — too difficult! No legislator wants to face a campaign ad against him pointing out, accurately, that he voted to decriminalize crime.

No, he’d just bankroll dozens (hundreds?) of leftwing DAs and AGs to ignore the laws entirely, claiming that prosecutorial discretion gives the absolute power to simply declare that The Law Is No Longer The Law.

She accepted several hundred thousand dollars in in-kind donations in the form of positive campaign ads in her favor — to allow her to beat other moderate Democrats who were not pro-criminal in the primary — which were paid for by Stalinesquely named “Safety & Justice Committee,” which is devoted to releasing hardened dangerous criminals from jail to kill citizens.

This committee is funded by George Soros.

Who also funded the Ferguson rioters.

Joe Steiger, president of the police union, said he believes that Soros also funded out-of-state activists to escalate protests into riots in Ferguson after the Aug. 9, 2014, police shooting of Michael Brown, 18.”It’s pretty insulting,” Steiger said Friday of the contribution to Gardner. “It’s more important for people to realize that calling for ‘black lives matter’ and ‘blue lives matter’ is not an opposite proposition.”

The convergence of the prosecutors, all supported by the same patron, demonstrates the emergence of a national alliance united by shared goals of overhauling the U.S. criminal justice system with an eye toward reducing or eliminating sentences for drug offenders and others.Aramis Ayala, the state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties in Florida, was on hand to support Gardner. Ayala was backed by $1.4 million from Soros. Stephanie Morales, a Virginia commonwealth attorney, was also in attendance and received $100,000 from Soros’s Justice & Public Safety PAC. Diana Becton, a prosecutor in Contra Costa County in California, also benefited from $1.5 million the financier poured into the state to support progressive prosecutors.

By the way: Soros also bribes “conservatives” online to accuse you of “anti-semitism” for accurately describing his efforts to fund the revolutionary left wing.

Despite the fact that he is not Jewish and in fact helped Nazis loot treasure from captive Jews.

But hey — his checks clear. So it’s antisemitic, now, to point out publicly available facts.

Well, with all this background established, you will not be much surprised to learn that Soros’ personal AG has set free every single fucking rioter and looter the police arrested.

In a stunning development, our office has learned that every single one of the St. Louis looters and rioters arrested were released back onto the streets by local prosecutor Kim Gardner. pic.twitter.com/tMZVAyHssw

Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Cabot Phillips said on Fox & Friends Wednesday morning that colleges are the “perfect place for Antifa to recruit” because of the type of atmosphere that’s been festering in academia for years.

Phillips responded to former Antifa member Gabriel Nadales, who is now an employee of Campus Reform‘s parent organization, the Leadership Institute, who said that colleges “allow Antifa to work under their noses.” Phillips said Antifa has been able to grow on campuses because “they know that classrooms are places that are inundating students with these anti-capitalist, anti-cop, anti-conservative messages.”

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones attempted to justify the ruthless rioting terrorizing American cities Tuesday by claiming simply, “property can be replaced.”

“Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” Hannah-Jones said on CBS News. “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”

“To use the exact same language to describe those two things I think really, it’s not moral to do that. So yes, I think any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other peoples’ property but these are not reasonable times,” Hannah-Jones added.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Vladimir Duthiers offered no pushback and even applauded her deranged analysis.

“It’s a great point that you make, Nikole,” Duthiers said.

At the end of the piece, the Times pinned the article with a note that reads, “A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them.”

The note also links to a broader 500-word “update” to the project included seven months after publication, during which the legacy paper pushed the collection of essays to be included in classroom curriculums. This update from the Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein concedes, “We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.”

While the two-word error might seem small, it is in fact significant given the Times’ aggressive mission to implement the papers in American classrooms to pin the nation’s origins on the practice of slavery which has been extinct in this country for more than 150 years. The project has since become emblematic of a broader Left-wing movement to paint the United States as an irredeemable breeding ground of white supremacy contributing to the rise of angry mobs terrorizing the very country that has in reality has stood as a beacon of individual liberty and inalienable rights.

Watch this short documentary debunking the historical fallacies of the 1619 Project here.

The governor of Michigan — whose strict coronavirus lockdown policies have caused infamous revolts in the state — is taking heat after her husband appeared to have flouted some of her own advice about holiday travel.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pushed some of the strictest regulations in the country as Michigan became engulfed in cases and deaths, prompting widespread protests by some residents, including those who stormed the state house last month bearing nooses, swastikas and guns screaming, “Lock her up!”

Last Monday, Whitmer announced that she was lifting some lockdown restrictions in areas before Memorial Day weekend.

But “if you don’t live in these regions … think long and hard before you take a trip into them,” she said.

“A small spike could put the hospital system in dire straits pretty quickly. That’s precisely why we’re asking everyone to continue doing their part. Don’t descend on [waterfront] Traverse City from all regions of the state.”

Three days later, a marina owner wrote on Facebook that the governor’s husband, Marc Mallory, had asked its workers to get their nearby boat in the water before Memorial Day, a report said Monday.

The vacation property that the governor and her husband own is about 25 minutes form Traverse City, the Detroit News said. The couple’s main residence is in Lansing.

“This morning, I was out working when the office called me, there was a gentleman on hold who wanted his boat in the water before the weekend,” NorthShore Dock LLC owner Tad Dowker wrote Thursday on Facebook, according to the Detroit News, which said the posting has since been made private.

“Being Memorial weekend and the fact that we started working three weeks late means there is no chance this is going to happen,’’ Dowker wrote, the paper said.

“Well our office personnel had explained this to the man and he replied, ‘I am the husband to the governor, will this make a difference?’ ”

The docking company later said on its Facebook page that Mallory was respectful when told it couldn’t accommodate him, according to the News.

Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett, R-Charlotte, noted to the News that Whitmer had urged state residents not to flock to Traverse City, and “Yet, what did her family try and do?

“In the Army, we have a tradition that the leaders get in line for chow last behind everyone else in the unit,” he said. “Here is the leader of our state. … Her family is trying to cut people in line.”

Whitmer’s spokeswoman, Tiffany Brown, did not deny the claims involving her boss’s husband to the News but said the governor’s office would not be responding to “every rumor that is spread online.”

“….I think that the dangerous – you know – edges here are that he’s trying to undermine the media. Trying to make up his own facts. And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think.And that is the, that is our job.”

(TCP News) The [pdf copy] >Susan Rice email < [pdf copy] is simply more conformation of what is already known – the Obama Administration targeted General Flynn.

Barack Obama knew about, and participated in the targeting of General Michael Flynn.

Joe Biden lied – he not only did have knowledge of the Flynn affair, he actively participated in it.

While the liberal Left is quick to dismiss this as just another “nothingburger,” it is anything but.

As noted, Obama and Biden both knew about and participated in this sham operation against General Flynn. Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed he knew nothing about Michael Flynn. Sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton who knew nothing about 33,000 missing emails.

In a recent interview, Biden stated: “I knew nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn…,” then Biden stammers and backtracks saying he did know that there was an investigation. But don’t take my word for it, watch and listen:

Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia, was based on such weak “evidence” that a former FBI executive says it should have never been opened up “in a million years.”

A newly declassified memo dated July 31, 2016, which launched the entire investigation, was based not on any evidence of wrongdoing by any members Trump campaign. As John Solomon at Just The News observes, the investigation was opened based on “a third-hand ‘suggestion’ of wrongdoing and the thinnest of suspicions that illegal foreign lobbying had occurred.” The memo makes clear that the criminal basis for Operation Crossfire Hurricane was suspected violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the memo does not identify a single incident violating that law.

Rather [the memo] focused on a “suggestion” passed on by Australian ambassador Alexander Downer that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos might be coordinating with Russia the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Downer had heard the information about the Russians during a bar conversation in May 2016 from Papadopoulos, who had heard it two months earlier from a European professor who had heard it from Russians allegedly.

The memo shows the case agent, Peter Strzok, expressed some doubts and reservations about the limitations of the evidence even as he opened the probe.

“There is nothing in the [electronic communication] that meets the traditional thresholds for opening up a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] or [counterintelligence] investigation,” Kevin Brock, the former chief of intelligence for the FBI, told Just the News. “It appears hastily constructed.”

According to Brock, there are other red flags contained in the memo, including Peter Strzok’s drafting and approving the opening of his own investigation and segregating the memo, preventing interagency oversight.

When asked by Just The News if he would have approved the opening of Crossfire Hurricane based on the memo, Brock said he would not have. “Not in a million years. I wouldn’t have approved it as a squad supervisor either. This would have set off alarm bells in any FBI field for not meeting our standards for a predicate.”

The memo shows “there was no serious basis for the Obama administration to launch an unprecedented spy operation on the Trump campaign,” says Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Wach. “We now have more proof that Crossfire Hurricane was a scam, based on absurd gossip and innuendo. This document is Exhibit A to Obamagate, the worst corruption scandal in American history.”

Fitton added, “This document shows how Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney Durham are right to question the predicate of this spy operation.”

So why would FBI agents have opened up an investigation based on the weakest of evidence into a presidential candidate, who was also a major critic of the sitting president at the time? It is quite clear that Obama’s FBI wanted to surveil the Trump campaign and was fishing for any excuse to do so. This latest evidence helps explain why the Obama administration applied for a FISA warrant against the Trump campaign even though they knew the Steele dossier they were relying on was based on Russian disinformation. This explains why the investigation persisted despite the fact it never found any empirical evidence of collusion. This also helps explain why Obama’s CIA director suppressed intelligence that actually showed that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win.

Barack Obama wanted to destroy Donald Trump, and he weaponized the federal government to make that happen, forcing a poorly-justified investigation that never would have passed muster under normal circumstances.

Flashback:
“I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today. And let’s back up and recall where we have been. The president of the United States accused his predecessor, President Obama, of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign. Nothing of the sort occurred, and we have heard that confirmed by the director of the FBI, who also pointed out that no president, no White House can order the surveillance of another American citizen.”

We have known for more than two years that, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration and just minutes before she left the White House for the last time, Susan Rice, then President Obama’s National Security Adviser, wrote a memo to herself about “Russia.” Specifically, she documented the fact, presumably for her later protection should the matter become public, that on January 5, 2017, President Obama had directed her to lie to her incoming counterpart, General Michael Flynn, about the Russia investigation that was then ongoing, in which General Flynn himself was, unbeknownst to him, one of the targets. This deception violated all historic norms, but it was vital if the Obama holdovers (James Comey et al.) were to be able to continue their “Russia investigation,” a bare pretext for unraveling Trump’s presidency, post-inauguration.

I wrote about Rice’s memo here. At that time, one key paragraph had been redacted from the memo. This is the text of the memo as we knew it two years ago:

On January 5, following a briefing by IC [intelligence community] leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.

President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book”. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.

From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.

Next comes the redacted paragraph, which was classified. It has now been declassified by Acting DNI Richard Grenell, in response to a request from Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham:

Director Comey affirmed that he is processing “by the book” as it relates to law enforcement. From a national security perspective, Comey said he does have some concerns that incoming NSA Flynn is speaking frequently with Russian ambassador Kislyak. Comey said that could be an issue as it relates to sharing sensitive information. President Obama asked if Comey was saying that the NSC should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied “potentially.” He added that he has no indication that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak, but he noted that “the level of communication is unusual.”

The memo concludes, as previously disclosed:

The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.

What is the significance of the newly-declassified paragraph? Several things stand out.

1) Rice fingered Comey as the person who supplied the basis for lying to her successor.

2) Note that Comey distinguished between the FBI’s law enforcement investigation and a separate “national security perspective.” It has been widely pointed out that Comey’s FBI carried out a criminal investigation against Trump and his associates in the guise of a national security investigation. They are quite different things, but Comey improperly merged the two. You can see the “national security perspective” offered as a distinct rationale in January 2017.

3) The stated grounds for lying to General Flynn were ridiculously weak. Comey claims that Flynn “is speaking frequently with Russian Ambassador Kislyak.” How frequently? We have all heard about one telephone conversation. How many others were there? We don’t know. Comey admits, in any case, that Flynn hadn’t said anything untoward to the Ambassador, just as it was later admitted that in the one conversation that has been the subject of public focus, Flynn did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, because Comey claimed “the level of communication [was] unusual,” Obama’s officials should take the step–unprecedented, as far as I know–of lying to a new administration’s incoming national security staff.

4) Lying about what? Rice’s memo is notably discreet here. She refers twice to “information…as it relates to Russia.” What does she mean? Information about our military dispositions vis-a-vis the Russians, on the ground that Flynn might pass them on to the Russian Ambassador? Of course not. No doubt Flynn was filled in on all such matters, with no faux concern that he might traitorously pass them on to the Russians. No: Rice’s “Russia” means the “Russia investigation,” in all of its permutations, which now stands revealed as the Obama administration’s effort first to guarantee Hillary Clinton’s election, and, failing that, to disable the new Trump administration before it could get off the ground.

Rice foresaw that despite the Obama holdovers’ best efforts, the truth about their “Russia investigation” could come to light someday. If that happened, she wanted it to be on record that President Obama had authorized her to lie, on advice from James Comey. This is not surprising, but it fills an important gap in our understanding of the corruption of the Obama administration.

Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your TV set, House Democrats want to bring you a rehash of an old TV show; Russiagate Impeachment Two-American people zero. House Democrats are suing the DOJ to get their hands on all the redacted Grand Jury material from the Robert Mueller investigation. The DOJ is asking for a stay of the Democratic demand until the full case can be argued and decided. impeach Trump again.

On 5/18, the Democrats gave the Supreme Court their reasons for wanting to get their grubby hands on the ordinarily secretive Grand Jury testimony.

House Democrats told the Supreme Court (see below) on Monday that they are again in the midst of an “ongoing presidential impeachment investigation” as part of their “weighty constitutional responsibility” – and, the Democrats argued, redacted grand-jury material from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s now-completed Russia probe must be turned over as a result.

Per their argument embedded below, the Dems are worried that if a stay is granted, they won’t be able to impeach Trump before their terms run out:

If DOJ’s request for a stay is granted, DOJ need not file its certiorari petition until August 2020,1 and therefore this Court likely would not determine whether to grant or deny that petition until at least October 2020. This substantial delay will seriously endanger the Committee’s ability to complete its impeachment investigation during the current Congress –which ends not long thereafter on January 3, 2021

Obviously, they don’t care about this country if they want to put us through another bogus impeachment. The DOJ argues that the Dems already made America suffer through an impeachment.

There is no merit to DOJ’s additional argument that the Committee no longer has a particularized need for the requested grand-jury material because the President was impeached and acquitted on separate Articles of Impeachment several months ago. The Committee’s investigation did not cease with the conclusion of the impeachment trial. The Committee “has continued and will continue those investigations consistent with its own prior statements respecting their importance and purposes.” The withheld material remains central to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the President’s conduct. If this material reveals new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles adopted by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly—including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment.

So what they are saying is so far they have nothing on the President, so they want to go fishing. They also mention that they wish to investigate Barr’s decisions regarding Roger Stone and General Flynn. I can’t wait to see that hearing. Barr will eviscerate Nadler to the point that his staple will fall out, and Nadler will blow up and fly like one of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons.

Robert Mueller, who is no supporter of President Trump, found no evidence supporting theories that Trump or his campaign conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election. In fact, recent reports suggest that John Brennan hid documents indicating that Putin wanted Hillary to win.

This Democratic Party suit is just their latest attempt to slander President Trump and possibly push him out of office in the 2020 election or before. Sadly, they don’t have a real track record to run on, or care about the American people.

This is one reason the stakes are so high this November.
The Left really does think this way.

I erased the middle letters of the f-word. As someone commented at the post, it seems obvious that not only have the shutdowns been far more severe than they needed to be, even some on the Left are starting to understand that there is no medical justification for continuing them. But that means that Democrat politicians such as Governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will no longer be able to rule by diktat and the power of the statists will lessen. That is unacceptable.

So the pivot: it does not matter that the shutdowns are not medically necessary. We find them politically desirable because we know never to let a crisis go to waste.

So let’s try this:

If a medically-informed response to a pandemic creates economic hardship so serious that the economic impacts are more deadly than the virus, you change your idea of what “medically-informed” really means when it kills more people than it saves, you Communist totalitarian murderer.

But we could tell that Dusti Sage, whoever she is, was really serious and very insightful because she used the f-word. That is reserved for only the highest levels of discussion among the self-anointed elite.

Update: When Dusti Sage speaks of the destruction of the economy, with permanent effects, everyone needs to understand that destruction of the existing economy is a longstanding goal of the Left. Covid is their excuse, not their reason. They do not need a reason, just an opportunity.

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

Medical professionals and a patient in Michigan have filed a lawsuit against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as the battles grow between her and those favoring relaxing the economic shutdown she has imposed in response to the coronavirus crisis.

Their lawsuit in federal court comes at a time when Ms. Whitmer continues to engage in a public spat with a 77-year-old barber, who has defied various orders and as of Thursday morning continued to cut hair at his Owosso shop.

The plaintiffs allege in federal court that Ms. Whitmer’s “drastic, unprecedented [and] unilateral executive actions” to cease economic activity that her office deemed nonessential were based on “grossly inaccurate” models that no longer apply and therefore should be lifted.

The Chinese Communist Party has threatened that American politicians seeking to hold China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic will face “severe consequences,” including targeted economic sanctions. An article in the Communist Party’s propaganda outlet, the Global Times, names many Republicans by name, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), along with Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas). It also names the attorneys general of Missouri and Mississippi, the two states that filed lawsuits against China.

“Republicans who have been groundlessly accusing China and inflaming the ‘holding China accountable’ political farce will face severe consequences, sources said, noting that the aftermath will also impact the upcoming November elections, while business and trade between Missouri and China will be further soured,” the Global Times reported.

“China is extremely dissatisfied with the abuse of litigation by the US against China over the COVID-19 epidemic, and is considering punitive countermeasures against US individuals, entities and state officials, such as Missouri’s attorney general Eric Schmitt, who filed a lawsuit against China, seeking compensation for the coronavirus pandemic, sources close to the matter told the Global Times exclusively,” the paper added. “At least four US Congress members, including Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, and two entities will be put on China’s sanctions list, analysts said.”

Banks, perhaps a lesser-known name on the Chinese Communist Party’s target list, led twenty-one of his fellow Republicans in sending a letter to Attorney General William Barr, demanding the U.S. bring a case against China in the International Court of Justice. He was the first lawmaker to suggest China should pay reparations for the fallout from the coronavirus crisis and he introduced a resolution making it clear that the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the pandemic.

He said he considers China’s threat against him a “badge of honor.”

“The Chinese government is lashing out at those in the U.S. who are appropriately trying to hold them accountable for intentionally misleading us about the nature of the novel coronavirus, where it was spreading and how quickly things were getting out of control. I consider their threats a badge of honor,” Banks said in a statement on Thursday.

PBS affiliates that receive millions of dollars in federal funding each year are airing a pro-Beijing documentary produced in conjunction with CGTN, a Chinese-government controlled media outlet that is registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department.

The film, “Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty,” did not disclose CGTN’s links to the Chinese government. Nor did it detail the ties that the film’s producer, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, has to Chinese officials and the government’s State Council Information Office, which specializes in foreign propaganda.

PBS affiliate KOCE, known as PBS SoCal, helped produce the film and premiered it Monday. KCET, which merged with KOCE in 2018, will air the show on Saturday. Other PBS affiliates, including in Idaho and Las Vegas, have either already aired the film or plan to do so later this month.

The one-hour documentary touts Chinese President Xi Jinping’s initiative to alleviate poverty in China by this year.

“In the last forty years, China’s economic development has lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty,” reads the introductory script in the film.

“To President Xi Jinping, ending poverty is his most important task,” the script states.

The closing credits of the documentary show that it was produced by “The Kuhn Foundation and PBS SoCal in association with CGTN.” One PBS SoCal employee is listed as an executive producer of the film and another is listed as a production assistant.

PBS and other publicly-funded news outlets like NPR have come under fire in recent years, with conservatives pushing to defund the organizations over a perceived liberal bias. Other news outlets have come under scrutiny for publishing propaganda promoted by the Chinese government.

President Donald Trump has proposed defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides the federal dollars that go to PBS affiliates and NPR.

Unidentified “individuals dropped off hundreds of ballots at a time,” the report said, citing the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets.

The bin was part of a process called “ballot harvesting,” in which political operatives are allowed to collect ballots from voters at their homes, then deposit the marked ballots at an official drop-off point for counting.

Such scenes have become commonplace in the Golden State since 2016 when then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed into law a number of measures meant, according to advocates, to enable more people to vote.

Two years later, the full effect of those measures became clear when Republicans, including five House incumbents, who appeared to have won seven California congressional seats on Election Day, lost when thousands of late-counted, harvested ballots changed the outcome to Democratic victories.

Since then, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her Democratic majority in the lower chamber of Congress have repeatedly tried but have failed to mandate the California measures for the entire nation.

“The thrust of our report is to raise the question why have the Democrats, since Day One when they took over the House majority, pushed to nationalize the process we’ve seen corrupted by political operatives already,” Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) told The Epoch Times on May 14.

Davis is the ranking GOP member of the congressional committee that investigates election irregularities. The report was based in part on observations by committee aides dispatched to California by the panel in 2018.

Corrupt election practices weren’t limited to California Democrats in 2018, according to the report, because “shortly after election day, allegations of fraud connected with ballot harvesting surfaced in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.

“It was here that Republican political operatives, through the ballot harvesting process, committed fraud on an unprecedented scale, nearly undetected,” the report said.

The report also noted that in 2019, House Democrats unanimously opposed a GOP motion to require public disclosure of foreign nationals involved in ballot harvesting.

Had the motion passed, it would have assisted law enforcement “targeting of foreign adversaries who seek to interfere in our elections,” according to the report.

Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) have scheduled a May 15 vote on their proposed $3 trillion CCP virus relief bill, which also includes provisions mandating states to mail ballots to every resident in advance of the 2020 presidential and congressional elections and to allow ballot harvesting, as happened in California and North Carolina.

The election mandates in the relief bill “are nothing new, they are just using different justifications for them,” Davis said.

He told The Epoch Times that “it is amazing to me that in an emergency, with a straight face, congressional Democrats can say ‘we want every single person who is registered right now in America’ to receive not just a form to request a ballot, but to have the actual ballot mailed to their house.

“They’re saying the only way to protect Americans during a pandemic is by doing vote-by-mail. They want to institutionalize a process that brings somebody to your front door to ask you why you have not yet turned in a ballot that was automatically mailed to your house.”

The same mandates also bar state officials from removing any registered voters from the rolls, Davis added. Nonprofit government watchdog Judicial Watch has won numerous court decisions in recent years forcing state officials to remove registered voters who have moved to other states or died.

The most recent such Judicial Watch suit would force Pennsylvania officials to address allegations that there are more than 800,000 such voters on the state’s registration rolls.

Democrats rejected the GOP report’s claims, with Spencer Critchley, a California-based campaign strategist, telling The Epoch Times, “This phony ballot harvesting story is just the latest move in the GOP’s relentless campaign of voter suppression.”

Critchley said the North Carolina scandal that was included in the report “to create the illusion that they really care about fair elections is also the only one for which there is actual evidence, and there’s a lot of evidence, because it was terrible.”

But Republican strategist Brian Darling said nationalized mail-in voting will encourage “the campaigns of both parties [to] concentrate resources on ballot harvesting and loading up the ballot box with mailed-in votes.”

That, in turn, he said, will mean “campaign funds will pay per-mail-in ballot and there will exist a perverse incentive for fraud. In-person voting has worked since the founding of our nation. Changing our system over to one that encourages mail-in ballots would take away from that tradition.”

When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.

But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.

If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

A Brief History of the Flynn Case
This is to be expected. For years now the media have done everything they can to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax—even after a years-long special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller turned up nothing—using the complexity of the scheme to hide the greatest political scandal of our time in plain sight.

A key aspect of that scheme was—and is—to make the case against Flynn appear legitimate. Flynn faced trumped-up charges that he misled FBI agents about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. (As the incoming national security advisor, Flynn was doubtless having conversations with numerous heads of state and ambassadors during this time, so there was nothing unusual about him talking to the Russian ambassador.)

The Obama administration already knew about the conversations with Kislyak because it had recordings of them thanks to a series of investigations it spun out of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign. Crossfire Hurricane, launched in the summer of 2016, was itself a bogus investigation based on the Steele dossier—an entirely fraudulent document riddled with Russian disinformation and paid for by the Democratic Party.

So why did the FBI want to interview Flynn ahead of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017? Top brass at the FBI weren’t exactly sure about their approach, but they knew they needed to get Flynn out of the way. As the bureau’s former head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap, recorded in his notes, “What is our goal? Truth/Admission, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

Apparently the Obama administration settled on trying to entrap him in a lie. The recent disclosure of an early January 2017 Oval Office meeting attended by Obama, vice president Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and FBI Director James Comey, confirms the administration’s plan to hide the Russia probe from the incoming Trump team—including Flynn.

The idea was to use the Kislyak calls as a pretext to keep the Flynn investigation open, even though there was no reason to do so. After months of spying on him, the FBI had found nothing to indicate Flynn was conspiring with the Russians.

As Rice wrote in an email to herself after the meeting, “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

The point was to keep the Flynn investigation open as a way for Obama holdovers like Comey, Yates, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to continue the Russia-Trump collusion probe even after Trump took office—and keep Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor, out of the loop. Since there was no reason to keep investigating Flynn, the Obama administration invented one: the preposterous notion that he intentionally misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Kislyak and then lied about it to the FBI.

There’s no evidence this happened, but even if there were it wouldn’t matter. As the Justice Department explained in its decision to drop the Flynn case, the investigation of Flynn was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.”

Later, top FBI and Justice Department officials gave the House Intelligence Committee different answers about why they were pursuing Flynn. Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord all gave conflicting testimony about the “primary purpose” of the FBI’s interview with Flynn, ranging from the outlandish notion that he violated the Logan Act—a constitutionally dubious 1799 law forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments—to the concocted charge that he lied to the FBI, which even the agents that conducted the interview with him didn’t believe.

Here’s Why Americans Need to Understand the Flynn Case
The Flynn case is just one piece of a much larger story about how the Obama administration—with the full knowledge and support of both Obama and Biden—targeted incoming Trump officials in a failed attempt to cripple the new administration with allegations it had colluded with Moscow.

The complexity of their scheme, and the efforts to hide it and mislead the American people, are frustrating. The cast of characters—from high-ranking Obama administration officials to relative nobodies loosely associated with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign—is long, as is the timeline of events. Details have come out slowly, in fits and starts, over the course of years. Following all the leaks and declassified transcripts and congressional hearings requires constant vigilance, and if you don’t keep up with it you can easily lose the thread.

That all works to the advantage of those who perpetrated this hoax, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed and tune it all out, or simply accept the corporate media’s deceptive reporting. But the ongoing revelations about the FBI’s targeting of Flynn can’t be ignored. They demand a full accounting. If ever there was a threat to the rule of law, it was the Obama administration’s abuse of power and its weaponization of intelligence agencies in an attempt to take down Trump.